A two-tier system could create ‘dirt roads’: Competing visions of the future are front and centre as governments tackle Internet neutrality
Alex Hutchinson, Ottawa Citizen
Sun
Telus temporarily blocked access to one website, showing the company was willing to act unilaterally as a gatekeeper, rather than a neutral gate to the Net.
OTTAWA — It used to be, not so long ago, that forwarded jokes were the common currency of the Internet — endlessly recycled, and partially obscured by the forest of “>>>” that accumulated with each forwarding.
Now, Internet laughs arrive in the form of links to video clips posted online: A teen in Trois-Rivieres, Que., mimicking Star Wars lightsabre moves with a golf club, comedian Stephen Colbert lambasting George W. Bush at the National Press Club dinner in April, even Ottawa Senators tough guy Brian McGrattan breaking Tie Domi’s nose last fall.
The trip from novelty to necessity has happened staggeringly fast. The video-hosting site Youtube.com, credited with finally making it easy and hassle-free for amateurs to share their clips, had its official launch in December. Just six months later, the numbers are staggering: six million unique visitors and 50 million videos downloaded every day, with another 50,000 new videos being added daily.
That’s a lot of bandwidth. With VoIP spreading rapidly and IPTV just arriving (telephone and television, respectively, transmitted over broadband Internet), industry insiders are starting to worry: will video kill the Internet?
One of the videos on Youtube, posted earlier this month, features the musician Moby in a mock-melodramatic four-minute clip titled Save the Internet. The video is the latest salvo in an increasingly heated battle over how Internet service providers will handle the impending bandwidth crunch. The debate centres on a concept known as “Net [as in network] neutrality.” Its advocates affirm the principle that all Net traffic, from videos to e-mail to e-commerce transactions, should be treated equally by ISPs.
But although net neutrality sounds like a motherhood-and-apple-pie concept that no one would oppose, a powerful lobby headed by major telecom companies in the United States is lining up on the other side, framing the debate as a case of excessive government regulation of the market.
Here is a choose-your-own-ending scenario that illustrates the dilemma:
Internet TV takes off, VoIP phones replace land lines, and other high-bandwidth applications — teleconferencing, online gaming, clips of Tie Domi beatings — continue to flourish. The current infrastructure starts bursting at the seams, so telecom companies invest millions to upgrade networks and run fibre-optic cable to every home. To recoup their costs, they begin offering premium service to websites (as opposed to consumers, who can already choose to pay for different levels of service): Youtube pays the ISPs to ensure its videos download quickly, Google pays to keep its searches snappy.
Ending A: The improved network provides better overall service for everyone, and the providers earn back their investment — plus a healthy profit — from the premium-service payments. They use the money to reinvest in the network, and to innovate in ways we haven’t even thought of yet, resulting in an Internet that just keeps getting faster and better.
Ending B: Google, Amazon, and the rest of the Internet giants pay the “protection money” demanded by ISPs to keep their traffic flowing. But smaller companies, and especially startups, are increasingly relegated to a second-tier “dirt road” network cursed by sluggish speeds and poor reliability. Consumers spurn these startups, innovation sputters to a halt, and the Internet becomes an oligarchy, a pale shadow of its once-exuberant self.
These two competing visions of the future are front and centre in an ongoing U.S. legislative battle. A motion to guarantee net neutrality — and thus outlaw the premium-service payments in the above scenario — was defeated 269-152 in the House of Representatives two weeks ago. The Senate is now considering a similar motion.
On this side of the border, the debate has been been much quieter.
The much-vaunted Telecommunications Policy Review, completed in March, focused most of its attention on reducing regulation and increasing competition in the telecom sector. But buried in the 392-page report was a recommendation that the Telecommunications Act be amended to “confirm the right of Canadian consumers to access publicly available Internet applications and content of their choice by means of all public telecommunications networks providing access to the Internet.”
Last week, Industry Minister Maxime Bernier tabled in Parliament a policy directive endorsing the main findings of the policy review — chiefly, a hands-off commitment to “regulate telecommunications services only when necessary.” Conspicuously absent was any mention of Net neutrality.
The minister’s lack of urgency raises an interesting question: Is the big bandwidth crunch really just around the corner?
It’s hard to tell, because network operators are playing their cards very close to their chest, partly for competitive reasons.
There are a number of ways that neutrality, in its strictest definition, can be compromised without creating an explicitly two-tier Internet. “Traffic-shaping” involves giving priority to certain kinds of traffic — Shaw Communications, for instance, promises to prioritize VoIP calls for an additional $10 per month.
The fear, Geist says, is that Shaw could choose to waive the fee if it decides to offer its own VoIP service, creating an unfair playing field in the VoIP market for Shaw customers.
Rogers is taking the opposite approach, using traffic-shaping to restrict the bandwidth allocated to peer-to-peer file sharing. Although the company initially denied it was traffic-shaping, it has since admitted the practice started more than a year ago.
Site-blocking is another, more direct possibility. Last year, the U.S. Federal Communications Commissions fined Madison River, a small North Carolina ISP, $15,000 US for blocking access to Vonage and other VOIP providers.
In Canada, Telus temporarily blocked access to a website supporting a union representing its own workers in a bitter labour dispute last summer. While fair competition wasn’t at stake in that case, it showed that Telus was willing to act unilaterally as a gatekeeper, rather than a strictly neutral gate to the Internet.
In the short history of the Internet so far, net neutrality has been the rule, only now being threatened by a wave of deregulation in both Canada and the United States.
As a result, net neutrality advocates say, we’re living in a golden age of Internet-fuelled innovation, which has allowed companies like Google and Amazon to emerge from nowhere and become multibillion-dollar giants in a single decade, and which still permits shoestring outfits like Youtube to grow to six million users in six months.
But the story of Internet innovation isn’t quite that simple, Hajnal says: big companies had to invest heavily even in the early days of the Internet. And just like in the traditional business world, new players that emerged did so on the strength of large-scale ambition and investment.
“Amazon didn’t start as a huge company, but it started intending to be big, and was looking to make a huge impact.”
With that in mind, the fear that a pay-to-play Web model will stifle new businesses may be unfounded, Hajnal says. “Whatever space is created, however it’s regulated, there will always be somebody who’s creative and trying to take advantage of it as a small player.”
There is more to it than just business and innovation, however. Musicians ranging from Moby and the Dixie Chicks to the rapper Q-Tip have signed up to defend net neutrality, both for practical reasons — preserving the ability to distribute music independently over the Web — and for more philosophical reasons. The “egalitarian” spirit of the Internet should be preserved, Moby said at a press conference earlier this month.
“Here we have a system that works fine,” he said. “Why do we want to change anything?”
Summing up the dilemma, Dale returns to the archetypal analogy of the Internet as an “information superhighway.”
The question is whether a two-tier Internet will create a poorly maintained dirt road for the have-nots, or instead add a superior toll-road without degrading the existing system.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006